‘WALL-E meets Apollo 13’: why Good Night Oppy documentary about a Nasa Mars rover will bring tears to your eyes
- When Mars rover Opportunity (Oppy) sent the message ‘My battery is low and it’s getting dark’, it grabbed the hearts of Nasa scientists, and filmmakers
- Oppy documentary maker Ryan White was fascinated at people pouring emotions into objects and, with Industrial Light & Magic’s help, gives us a real tear-jerker
Get those tissues ready. You’ll never again see robots as just lurching, whirring, beeping hunks of metal.
In 2003, the United States sent two rovers to explore Mars. The documentary Good Night Oppy (streaming now on Amazon Prime Video) revives that adventure, doing for gangly interstellar probes what the Oscar-winning 2020 documentary My Octopus Teacher did for that tentacled sea creature: humanise them.
The two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, or Oppy, were built to last roughly 92 days. Spirit lasted six years. And Oppy rambled across 28 miles (45km) of the red planet for nearly 15 years, driving its way into the hearts of Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) scientists. Think Pixar’s WALL-E meets Apollo 13.
Science documentaries don’t typically tug at the heartstrings. But Good Night Oppy director Ryan White says a 2019 viral tweet from Nasa convinced him and his production team that there was a very different story to tell.
Oppy had run into trouble during a Martian storm, so JPL scientists shut down most of its systems to preserve battery life. But doom loomed. The last message JPL received from its robot was, “My battery is low and it’s getting dark.”
